Dennis Rhodes
No Clouds Today
I’m surprisingly at peace today.
There seems to be a perfect storm:
I feel my meds doing their job
and keeping my anxiety low.
I want them to award the Nobel Prize
to the men and women who invented
Abilify. In truth, I feel no stress
at all, about anything, a miracle.
What on earth is happening to me?
Truvada gave me a new lease on life.
Poetry flows like a river to the sea.
If this is the day the Lord has made
I’m grabbing it by the balls, sober
and content—holding on for dear life.
Dennis Rhodes is the author of Spiritus Pizza & Other Poems (Vital Links, 2000) and Entering Dennis (Xlibris, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in BLOOM, Chelsea Station, Lambda Literary Review, The Cape Cod Times, New York Newsday, Fine Gardening, Avocet, Backstreet, Ibbetson Street, bear creek haiku, Aurorean, and Alembic, among other journals. Rhodes served as literary editor of Body Positive magazine (an important source of information for people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 90s) and later as poetry editor of Provincetown Magazine. He co-founded the Provincetown Poetry Festival and ran it from 1999–2001. For a number of years, Rhodes hosted a radio program on WOMR in Provincetown, featuring interviews and poetry readings with a different Provincetown or Cape Cod poet every week.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem is about long-term survival with HIV/AIDS. Write a poem about long term survival with HIV/AIDS, based either on your own experience, the experience of someone you know personally, the experience of someone you do not know personally but have learned about, or the imagined experience of an fictional person.